 Good afternoon everyone. It's right at three o'clock, so I'm going to go ahead and get us started. The University Libraries Diversity Committee is pleased to welcome our guest speaker today. Rachel Stevens is an associate professor of art history here at the University of Alabama. And she teaches courses in American art and architecture, southern art and architecture, slavery, and the Civil War, among other subjects. Her research focuses on the art and visual culture of the 19th century American South. Her first book, Selling Andrew Jackson, Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture, was released in 2018 from the University of South Carolina Press. Her current book project, Hidden in Plain, Slavery and Concealment in Antebellum American Art, is forthcoming in 2022 from the University of Arkansas Press. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships in support of her research, most recently from the National Gallery, Yale University, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Stevens is a member of the Faculty Task Force for the creation of a commission on slavery and its legacies at the University of Alabama. Today she will share elements of the research that she and others are investigating as part of this initiative. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Stevens. Hello. Thank you, Emmy, so much for the invitation. Thank you all for joining me together over Zoom. I wish I was there in person, but I'm on sabbatical this year, so I'm actually not even in Tuscaloosa, so I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk in this forum. And I should say that I have written out a script of information to share with you today, and I will do that just so I didn't forget what I wanted to talk about and kind of keep it all rolling. And I'll do that for about 40 or 45 minutes. But I invite you, if you want to jump in to ask questions as I'm addressing a certain topic or ask clarification, this can fully be a dialogue as I go along, if you'd like. If you want to hold off and I can read through information, then we'll have, you know, 15 or 30 minutes at the end to discuss. And I want to say that I by no means claim to be an expert on the topic I'm presenting to you today, but rather this is information I have started uncovering that's in our university libraries. And several of you will know lots more about certain aspects of things I discuss and I'd love for you to share what you know as well, because I hope that this is an endeavor that many of us on campus can undertake. And that is to research our antebellum history, particularly with regard to the lives and humanity of the enslaved people that were on our campus and integral to its fabric. So with that being said, I'll get started. Oh, before I do that, though, there is I want to just give a little warning. There is some violent acts that happened on campus towards enslaved people referenced in my talk. So mute me at any time if I'm covering a subject that is painful or that you don't want to you don't want to specifically hear about. And I do do that a couple of times. I'm going to share my screen to I do have some images to share. And like I said, if you'd like to jump in, I think if you do the hand raise hand feature, I'll see it on the side of my screen. So the history of slavery at the University of Alabama is significant, rich with wide implications and little understood. Information about the lives of enslaved people on UA's campus and the spaces they built and labored in and occupied is available of widely across a rich archival records in our campus library and beyond. However, over the generations of the writing of this history of the antebellum University, the deep reliance of the University on people it and its faculty and its presidents enslaved has not often been been acknowledged as we probably know. So today in 2021, there is a commitment by myself and by a number of faculty and staff and students and community members. And I think the rich attendance at today's event speaks to this to recover that history. And this will require a great effort and a lot of brains put together to do it, but a full history that not only addresses facts, but stories about people both black and white on the antebellum campus is possible to uncover. And I think it's imperative that we do this. So I'm going to go through a whole range of information really, and excuse me if these are things you already know. But I learned so much just from my reading of the Diaries of Basil Manly, the second University president. And within those diaries and he wrote on a daily basis and reported on all of the events that were happening across campus, particularly with regard to money and financial matters. You can see how integral the enslaved people on campus are to every single operation that was happening across the campus. And so I'll kind of break down a few of the different ways that those stories about those individuals come about here. And I found it incredibly fascinating to learn about. So within our campus community that's still facing the ramifications of generations of enslavement, racism, segregation, white supremacist thought, I firmly believe that a full reckoning is not possible. And the growth in the healing that comes along with that, without an understanding of this past. So although we have lost or many records have been destroyed, that is no excuse for knowing and telling this full history. Often when you hear about the history of enslavement in America, there is an excuse that, oh, the information just isn't available. And while it's not directly available, as in often words of enslavers haven't been recorded, the stories are there. And it just requires a little bit of reading between the lines. And acknowledgement that the viewpoint that we get is almost always the viewpoint of the enslaver. So we're reading Basil Manley's Diaries. And he was the enslaver and the promoter of slavery at UA in the years he was here. And so that's the perspective we're getting. But that doesn't mean that information about the people he's writing about doesn't come through. And it comes through pretty strongly. And I think you'll see that. So these records, including those diaries, allow for a fuller view on to the university's antebellum history. And in particular, they shed light on the really integral role played by enslaved people on campus, including fascinating information about their lives and their labor. This is just an excerpt from a page of the Manley Diaries. He was fairly legible with his handwriting, which is always nice for a 19th century person. And he actually was super organized in them because you can see along the margins of each one, he summarizes the topic that he then goes on to address. Interestingly, here you can also see that he wrote in code sometimes. If he didn't want information to be publicly available, you can see he had little codes in some of them. So that's one of his codes. And here's another down here. It often relates to who told him the information. He keeps that private for some reason. It's really interesting. So although the University of Alabama's campus was mostly raised during the Civil War, the campus is really still rich with physical and archival remnants from the Antebellum period. Four buildings from the original campus remain. You can see those here. And all of these were built, inhabited, maintained, or served by enslaved people, as was the entire campus over the first three plus decades of the University's existence. So through an evolving system of enslavement that involved University and private ownership of enslaved people, as well as the rental and hiring of their services from other people who enslaved them, UA was really a racially diverse campus during the Antebellum period, even though the only students accepted were white male students. So we see with these individuals, enslaved individuals, that is a simultaneous trust and disrespect of them in the records. And that sort of speaks to the complicated structure of enslavement. But they were also a really significant part of the cog of the University, involved in its construction and upkeep, and in pretty much every part of its very fabric. Students, faculty, the president, and enslaved people were all in daily, almost constant interaction. And we have to keep that in mind as well. So I'll just share some basic information about some of the details of the history of enslavement on our campus. And I hope you'll see how enslaved people in their efforts are really integral to the core of the foundation of UA. And I believe we have an urgent need to acknowledge the role of everyone involved in the history. We don't have a great portrait of Basil Manley, but this is what we have. And it's there in the whole collections. But in my own research, the diaries of Basil Manley have served as my starting point and really just an eye-opening experience to go through them. He was the second president of the University. He was long-serving from 1837 to 1855. He was a Baptist preacher, a pro-slavery lobbyist, an educator, and himself an enslaver. And like I said, he wrote copiously about the daily life on campus. So the multiple volumes of his diaries that are at Hull Library and have been wonderfully digitized, so we can all access them from wherever, he kept over the course of his presidency. And they detailed the daily operations, like I said, of the University, and include much reporting on those enslaved people and their status and various information about them. So he was really reporting the daily operations in a mechanical way. But the details, like I said, allow so much to emerge about the individuals he and the University enslaved. He details the University's reliance on enslaved people for everything from shining shoes to hauling water from Mars Spring to delivering coal to students' rooms to outright construction of University buildings. So Manley was not only complicit in the maintenance of the slave system at the University of Alabama, he worked to actively strengthen it, and he pushed the Board of Trustees to purchase enslaved people, and he relied on them fully for the daily operations of the University. But the entire University, you know, we don't want to make him the scapegoat either because the entire University was implicated here. But for those 18 key antebellum years that he was there, he exercised an enormous amount of control and influence, not only at the University, but across the state. Like I said, he was a preacher from South Carolina and an enslaver and an ardent secessionist. He spearheaded the secession, for example, of the Southern Baptist Convention away from the National Organization in 1845. His efforts in sermons eventually earned him the role of the chaplain of the Confederacy. And he would later arrive at the opening convocation of the Confederacy in the carriage with Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stevens to deliver the opening prayer. So he's fully implicated in the Confederacy and secession and the fight for enslavement that went along with that. So his biographer, James Fuller, describes, quote, far from surrendering to the society around him. Manly actually worked to change traditions. And at the University of Alabama, that extended to overt support of slavery, the expansion of the reliance on enslaved labor on campus, and ultimately the ownership of enslaved people by the University. There were surprisingly or not actually anti-slavery supporters in the original founding of UA. So one of the first faculty was an anti-slavery activist named Henry Tutwiler. However, as historian Al Brophy states, when Manly arrived, the active anti-slavery movement at the University left. And sure enough, when shortly after Manly's arrival, Tutwiler left the University. The hiring of Manly as the president of the University made a clear statement about the state's commitment to slavery. And according to Brophy, Manly was an important disseminator of pro-slavery rhetoric. And we see this play out in many ways across his presidency. He stated, for example, that he supported the rights of Southerners to buy and sell enslaved people at will. And he did this on behalf of himself and the University. He also advanced a curriculum for the students that was fully supportive of the institution of slavery. And as we will see, much of his time on president was involved in the buying and selling and the managing of enslaved people. So in a letter to Alabama Governor Gale, upon receiving the appointment to the presidency of UA, Manly wrote, quote, colleges in the South deal with particular difficulties. So this job is very important. And this is a portrait of William Bullock. Many of you have probably walked by this. This and his portrait of his wife are hanging there in Hull. They're beautiful, recently clean portraits. But in the years of the foundation of the University, the population of enslaved people in Alabama was increasing faster than that of any other state. And as some of us learned just last week demonstrated by Dr. Joshua Rothman by the time of the Civil War, the state was deeply reliant on enslaved labor. And what I'm talking about with Dr. Rothman is that last week, the DEI office hosted a teaching about the history of slavery on campus. And if you go to the, the diversity office's website, diversity.ua.edu and click on events, there's a recording of Dr. Rothman, Dr. Jenny Shaw and Reverend Thaddeus Steel talking more about this history if you want to dive in even more. And I can send you the link if you want to just ask me for it later. Anyway, in 1860, 45% of Alabamians were enslaved. Tuscaloosa County aligned with those numbers, having 10,000 residents in 1860, 44% of whom were enslaved. And in 1845, 90% of Alabama's students were from slaveholding families. So William Inge seen here who would later marry a woman named Elizabeth Brock Herndon, whose father was a pioneer in Alabama, eventually enslaved more than 800 people. And a student named Inge, and I'm not sure it's the same Inge, because Manly only identifies him as Inge, amusingly appeared in Manly's diary when he was an undergrad student. He said, the diary entry says, a student named Inge dressed in a wig and military clothes and was uttering an unintelligible words in a negro tone. So speaking in dialect, Manly himself also enslaved 38 people personally by 1855, just to set up some of the facts we're dealing with here. So the University of Alabama started serving students in 1831, and over the antebellum period, typically educated between 50 and 100 white male students per year. Students subjected to strict regulations, and according to Robert Malone, quote, Alabama's first students were, for the most part, rowdy, rebellious, high-spirited young men, and you've probably heard some of the stories of the shenanigans pulled by the students, but these appear in copious ways across the Manly diaries. The University was plagued from the beginning by constant student misbehavior, and this was very, very troubling to Manly, but it's rumored to have actually led to the resignation of the first University of Alabama president, Alva Woods, who lasted until 1837. However, Wood's lack of support for slavery may have also played a role in his departure, and the misbehavior continued under Manly, and he obsessively reported it, and it included things like pranks and drunkenness, which he was adamantly opposed to. Pistol firing, fighting, whispering during prayer is regularly reported. Coming home from town drunk was another problem. At one point the University gates were removed and hung from trees. Crackers were thrown into the fire during class to make popping sounds. There was lots of property destruction, so they were dealing with a lot of stuff like that, and sometimes the students misbehaved while in blackface, which is an interesting notion that Manly reports on. In another case, a calf was put in Mr. Foster's recitation room, so into the classroom. Another one was hoisted onto the roof of the rotunda and tied to the lightning rod, so Manly admonished students for this behavior. He called them out at the twice daily University prayers. He asked them to confess, express their regret, and that was generally the punishment that was doled out. Students, if they were more than troublesome, would have to meet with students, would have to meet with the faculty. Other punishments could be doled out. Several were expelled from the University for things like this. Manly managed University disciplined by applying evangelical notions of conscience, as you see, but the most common consequence for students who broke the rules was being required to show remorse and apologize to the faculty. That happened constantly. Inslaped people, on the other hand, were regularly subjected to violence and pranks, which is a situation that's at odds with this, I might say, bizarre 2015 painting of the history of the University. Some of you might know about this painting more than I do, and if you do, I'd love to know a little bit about it. The student pranks and violence extends, of course, to the enslaved people that were everywhere around them. For example, in May 1847, a student named Phillips Fitzpatrick, quote, according to the diary, stuck a fork in the thigh of servant Jerry hired at the Stuart's house during breakfast. For that, Fitzpatrick was fined $3. And then in 1843, Manly reported that a student James and Foster and two others coming home from town drinking, caught my man Augustus and beat him with a stick, broke his head and without provocation. For this, Foster was suspended until he apologized, asked to pay the doctor bill of a dollar and to donate $3 to Augustus. Stories of widespread violence against the enslaved people, like I said, proliferate across the diaries as well. Punishments for enslaved people were a whole different matter, and they went beyond asking for apologies. Manly ordered enslaved people to be whipped on numerous occasions, and he unabashedly reports that in the diaries. So on March 4th of 1846, he reported the following. This afternoon, the College Boy Sam behaved very insolently to Thomas G. Green and refused to measure or receive a load of coal which Green had bought. By order of the faculty, he was chastised in my room in their presence, not seeming humbled. I whipped him a second time very severely. The following month, Manly reported that in his absence from campus, his enslaved man Moses had been impudent to Mr. Barnett, after which he caused him to be well whipped in my presence by Mr. Barnett. Further, the University-owned enslaved man Sam was threatened with sale repeatedly, and Manly wrote in 1850 that, quote, my private opinion is that he should be sold, and they were threatening to sell him on and off over years as a matter of policy, but I'm not afraid that he will disobey or displease me personally in any serious degree. So on the one hand, he held great private trust for Sam, but at the same time, he wanted to sell him away and had ordered him to be flogged in front of the faculty. Faculty were also, of course, implicated here. So Manly regularly used people enslaved by him for university business and used university enslaved people for personal business. There didn't seem to be any kind of division amongst the enslaved community there. And he also frequently loaned or rented people he enslaved to university faculty and to other employees, such as geology professor Dr. Michael Toomey, enslaved people regularly accompanied Dr. Toomey on his state geological surveys, for example. And then despite being perhaps an abolitionist or suspected of being an abolitionist, chemistry professor Frederick Barnard benefited from enslaved people who worked in his lab. Furthermore, English professor Horace S. Pratt rented people he enslaved to the university and his widow continued that practice for many years after his death. These included at one point the quote Carpenter's James William and apprentice Edward, and Manly described how in 1846 Carpenter William, Mrs. Pratt came to work in repairs this morning. He brings a boy who is learning the trade as an apprentice. Now when I see passages like that, the architectural historian me gets pretty excited to learn about and gain important insight into ideas like skills training for the enslaved, cooperative learning that took place within the enslaved community, sort of a sense of how that training was acquired. The university operated under that complex system of enslavement that I've been referencing. So the university owned a handful of enslaved people at any given time and that grew over the course of the antebellum period. They also rented the labor or hired out the labor of enslaved people from their owners in town and personal enslaved people brought by faculty or the president were also present. So the renting of the labor of enslaved people from town occupies a large proportion of the enslaved people who were on campus at any given time. And we see a lot of information about them across the Manly Diaries for years. So how this worked is that their owners slash enslavers would be paid for their work on campus and they were worked very hard. That also comes about in the Diaries. It becomes standard practice, like I said, with lots and lots of information available about those people and that's a great avenue for research I think going forward. So some information about some of the people that are mentioned that whose labor was hired out. Two men identified as Scipio and Peter were two men enslaved by Professor Pratt. They were hired by the college for the entire year of 1839 with their duties listed as attendance on the dormitories. So enslaved people worked for the students in the dormitories in a number of ways. Pratt for their work was paid $200. And the contract stipulated that he was responsible for providing their clothing. Pratt died the following year in 1840 but his widow, like I said, Eliza Pratt continued this practice for years and that's one of the ways she earned her living. In addition, the university resident trustee Colonel W.D. Stone made the deal and signed various deals for the Pratt enslaved people to be hired out to campus and Manly justified their expense. He's always justifying the expenses. He said in this regard, the university must have servants and those of the right kind. So he's always justifying the high prices paid for that labor. Scores of enslaved people, like I said, were rented out by the university over the years for shorter periods and specific tasks and also for longer periods like that entire year. And those often came from local women, like Widow Pratt. And so for example, on January 16th, 1845, Manly noted that he, quote, hired Prince, the servant of Miss Drysdale to work on repairs of buildings, etc., etc. at the rate of $10 a month. So the going rate FYI seems to be between about $100 and $160 on a yearly basis. Under Manly however, additional enslaved people began being purchased by the university. And so Manly became president in 1837. The university purchased an enslaved man, Sam, that I referenced before in 1838. UA trustees then voted to purchase an additional enslaved person in 40 and again in 42. 42 Manly listed that person as being purchased for the service of the dormitories. And then after this, the purchases become more frequent. A man named Moses who's listed as being between the ages of 28 and 30 and served the campus for many, many years was purchased on January 1st, 1845 for $600. He ultimately had a wife and a family that Manly notes were living on the premises. And so that's another instance of those traces that we can allow us to peer into the private lives of that the enslaved people on campus work to maintain. Another reference from Manly on the death of an enslaved man named Jack from pneumonia in 1841 describes how he was an African, a member of the Methodist Church, honest and faithful, and was buried in the university's burial ground. So again, we can get tidbits about his religious practices, for example, and things like this. Sam by the way, was ultimately sold away from the university. And it's a little unclear in the diaries what happened, but I believe he was sold to an alum named D Connerly and taken and perhaps they had formed some sort of a relationship with each other while Connerly was a student. But he took him away from campus to Pickensville, Alabama. And then in 1852, the following year a 25 year old man named Isaac was purchased with the proceeds of the sale of Sam from Winchester, Virginia for the astounding cost of $1,300. By 1860, just so we see the building of this over time, a professor named George Benaw was sent to Virginia with the authority to spend up to $7,000 on enslaved people for the university. So Manly continued buying and selling enslaved people for his personal use as president as well. For example, he notes that he purchased a woman named Nancy, who was in her early 40s in 1845, from an enslaver named Jay Latham in Centerville, Alabama, as a caretaker for his children. So I have not done this particular research, but that's an enticing detail in which we get information about Nancy. We also get information about her enslaver and the location she came from. And to me, there's so many traces there throughout the records that can be traced back through to find out more information about those enslaved people beyond the basic facts we have reported by Manly. He also reported in 1845 that he was forced to sell a man that he enslaved named Augustus. Augustus was accused of sexual harassment. While he was being hired out to another person, Manly felt Augustus would be unemployable after this, and he claimed reluctance but ultimately sold him, even though he was what Manly called a family negro. So the diary details information about the lives of people he enslaved, both personally and the servants for the college, in other ways as well. For example, he purchased an enslaved woman 22-year-old named Mary, who had a 14-month-old baby named William called Boyzie in 1838 from a man in Mobile named Robert G. Brown, again enticing details for further research. And she was transported up the rivers, according to Manly, to Tuscaloosa, and he reported many things about Mary over the years. For example, at one point she broke her arm at 1 a.m. From a fall down the stairs, supposedly, she gave birth to children, including a little baby girl named Binky. And so in these details, we can get some information about individual enslaved people on campus. Ben was actually the first enslaved person to be purchased by the university long before it ever opened. He was purchased by the Board of Trustees in 1828. We opened in 1831 for student admission. He helped construct the campus, and that's what he was purchased for. He was ordered to assist William Nichols planting trees, repairing fences, everything. But he was sold along with a horse after construction was complete in 1831. So the callousness of that information strikes me there. Lodging and food for enslaved people were constantly being negotiated over the years. Manly addresses lodging the enslaved people at one point saying, the faculty have been obliged to allow them to sleep in vacant rooms on the lower floor of one of the colleges. But he resolved that once any of those rooms were needed by students, that it was, quote, wholly improper to have the students quartered in any part of the dormitories. So we see them sort of occupying spare spaces across campus, sometimes in buildings where construction wasn't even complete, rather than having standalone slave quarters, as you might imagine. So he proposed lodging them at one point in a small house west of the Steward's premises, and the Steward's house was now Gorgus House. But often it seemed like they were sleeping on the floors of dormitories and other spaces. And we get a sense of this when Manly reports that Arthur's so-called bed was stolen from a room that he was charged with guarding in the Franklin dormitory. And his bed actually comes to find out consisted of two blankets. And there are other instances where we see blankets being given to enslaved people on campus. And so that was probably what they were used for as a pallet on the floor. Rented enslaved people were usually provided as a term of the agreement, meager room, board, and clothing, depending on the terms. Like I said, they slept in a variety of places over the years. Boarding houses were rented out for them, other quarters, those vacant rooms. A receipt from 1839 covers the boarding of three enslaved people at an off-campus boarding house that belonged to a man named Benjamin Whitfield at a rate of $10 per month. That was a kind of typical boarding price, maybe a bit less than students paid for board at the time. And then by the 1840s, there seems to have been a sort of long-running term where the university steward would board enslaved people at what is now Gorgus House for no cost. But in exchange, he could use their work in the dining room during meals. And they could work for him during school breaks. Furthermore, in 1848, $144 was appropriated for the university-owned enslaved men, Moses, Arthur, and Sam, for the entire year. So there's all these financial situations that Manley's constantly negotiating in his records as well. Enslaved people, though, were the human engines that really drove the university. And in learning this stuff, that's the idea that comes about again and again. Made most plain-spokenly clear by Manley in 1840 in a report to the Board of Trustees when he says, in short, we could not do business for a single day without slaves. He openly acknowledged this notion. His diaries lay out the incredible amount of sheer labor that enslaved people performed, seemingly around the clock. So I think we've got to change the way that we typically consider, in this regard, given all this information, university architecture, for example. Often there was either an architect or a foreman of sorts, but Manley readily admits that it was the enslaved people actually doing the work, and often without any or very little oversight in doing that. That speaks a lot, not only to the incredible trust that was put in them, but the skills they possessed and their ability to construct and repair, and they were constantly doing that work. They were assigned a wide range of tasks, everything under the sun. Usually the university-owned slaves had set duties, as did the ones that were hired out, and this could include attending dormitories or classroom buildings, and attending to anything from guarding, keeping an eye on students, painting, whitewashing, glazing windows, just everything under the sun. And they were really given any work that, as Manley put it, when he was describing the work of two men hired out by the college named Peter and William, he said, as to their employment, it is difficult to state it. Besides their daily work about the colleges, they have some two or three hours a day for other work which have been spent in whatever seemed most for the benefit of the university. So he described Williams, for example, ready use of tools as an excellent carpenter, as well as being a good house servant, and he justified Williams' extra expense in hiring him out from Mrs. Pratt by saying that in various little jobs, he saved the university more than the cost of his hire. So the range of services employed by universities enslaved people knew no bounds. Manley would send enslaved individuals to track down students who were not where they were supposed to be or were facing punishment. Some enslaved individuals were, for example, charged in bell ringing of a paid position in 1837, landscaping, construction jobs, thousands of trees on campus were planted by enslaved people. They laid bricks, they painted walls, they put shingles on roofs. If there wasn't a university enslaved person with a certain skill set, then those were skills that were sought out in the hiring out process and rented from town or from other faculty. So based on the regular reporting of the progress of his house, the president's mansion, Manley was very involved and interested in his completion, maybe quite obviously. He was living in the faculty housing before he had this mansion constructed. He described how the servants owned and those employed by the university have been engaged during the vacation and during all spare hours of every day and aiding to carry on such improvements as were in progress on the premises. So if you didn't follow that, enslaved people were working around the clock on the premises of the construction site of the president's mansion, as he said. He went on to say, as there have been great and constant demand for laborers there about the new building. They have chiefly been employed in various operations. They do various laborers every day in the year and much has been done. He reported that he and his family moved into the mansion, presumably with multiple enslaved people. April 13, 1841, it was not quite complete and work did continue on it for a number of years. In 1850, for example, the colonnade, the columns out front were being constructed by an architect named Robert Hall, but he was insisted in his work by a number of enslaved men. And then behind the mansion, of course, there were four quarters for Manley's personally owned enslaved people. So there's those four original one-story brick buildings. The outer two were designed as houses for the president's personal enslaved people. The one nearest the house was the kitchen. It's now a garage and the other was a wash house, so additional site of work. So as you might see, the antebellum campus should actually be credited, I believe, as a physical manifestation of the work of enslaved people. Manley reported, for example, that the college servants, for example, made a ditch and temporary fence around a new graveyard. Later, William and Edward constructed a garden fence at the Athenaeum. In 1846, he reported that Moses was employed half the day Monday and all day Tuesday in repairing the damage done by the students over the preceding weekend. Peter and William furthermore, quote, worked on the improvements for the building until completed. Oh, I forgot what building he's talking about here. I think it might be the president's mansion there, but also planted trees, whitewashed and painted dorm rooms and labs and glazed windows. Remarkably, William Pratt made lots of furniture across the university, including for the trustees room and the president's house, and later he built cases for rooms across the university. I love that notion of the furniture. I'd love to be able to track down the furniture. In 1848, it was reported that, quote, William and Edward came to work on the furniture of the hall for the Sons of Temperance University Division on Friday at noon, January 18th. They were taken away by Professor Garland for some work on the observatory. So these enslaved people are physically constructing repairing and working across the campus in any number of ways. Furthermore, 1846, mainly reported to my two carpenters, William and Willis, with Moses and a boy laborer to assist finish the Jefferson building. In this case, they were finishing the roofing. It was a high roof, he said, and they laid on 30,750 shingles. Remarkably, Manley also lists what he says, tools belonging to the college in the possession of Moses. And I'll name these for you. One plaster's trowel, one mason's trowel, one chisel, one hoe, one socket spade, one hand cart, one hand saw, one forplain, one wheelbarrow, a shingling hatchet, and a hand saw. So the range of tools in Moses's possession demonstrate a measure of his skill, I believe, and show just the wide range of things he was able and charged with doing. The history of slavery at Alabama continued directly until the university was burned, just five days before Lee surrendered to Grant at the end of the Civil War. Manley had moved on in 1855, but was replaced by another ardent secessionist and supporter of slavery, Landon Garland, who continued the university's reliance on the labor of enslaved people. I think we've got to understand the antebellum campus with a much, much wider view than the traditional history of students and graduates and presidents. So the picture that emerges from all of this information that I've shared with you today is one of incredible labor demanded from enslaved people, enormous benefit provided by them to the university, all within the context of being unfree. Despite this, we see enslaved people forming families, practicing Christianity, and working as the most skillful people on campus. Six years after that enslaved woman, Mary, had arrived on campus with her baby son, William Boise Brown, he died of hooping cough and was buried in the college burial ground. But it wasn't until April 15, 2004, 160 years after his death that the university recognized the burial site of Boise as that of an enslaved individual, and you can see the plaque here that's outside the biology building today. Much remains to be done on our campus, though, and I think this could start, oh, I thought I had a picture of the quarters, but I don't. With the slave quarters behind the president's mansion, this seems like an obvious site for kind of university intervention from my perspective. The exterior of those buildings is original to their 1841 construction, but the interiors, as far as I know, were repurposed as storage space. And so while the university is not necessarily hiding the history and significance of those buildings, they are seemingly ignoring it. Now, I've had the pleasure over the last two years to begin working toward a more university-driven study of these enslaved people that's still quite honestly getting off the ground. But some of you may have heard about this faculty task force for the formation of a commission on the study of slavery and its legacies at UA. So there's a number of us, including Kate Matheny, who's among your ranks, who are working to figure out how best to organize and promote this information with university backing. So that's where we're at now. We're in progress and hoping by this fall to have an active working group of faculty and others who are even more deeply engaged in this research than I have been to this point. So with that, I'll stop talking. I've talked enough. And I'd love to know your thoughts, questions, really anything. And I'll stop sharing my screen so we can see each other. That was wonderful. Thank you, Dr. Stevens. Oh, and I see Kate put up the video from last week's discussion. It's really worth watching, I think. Hi, Rachel. I'm Donnelly Walton here in Hool. And I did want to tell you that if you do want to know more about the Dean Mosher painting from 2015, just let us know. And we can talk more about it. I don't know how widely it's known that the artist did lots of research here to find information about all the buildings. So just from that perspective, he was trying to give an accurate portrayal of what the buildings would have looked like on campus. I'll leave the art and everything out of it. But yeah, feel free to get in touch with us. You can email me or anybody here at Hool, and we can tell you more about that. Thank you so much. I definitely will. I want to know. My students want to know. I certainly don't mean to denigrate something I don't know much about. And it does look in some ways accurate. But the sort of the romanticization of the campus in it is something we need to think critically about, I think. Yeah. It's an interesting painting at best. But we did help him just finding all the information about what would the roof have looked like back then on the different buildings and those kinds of things. So we can talk about that. Yeah. I'll reach out. Thank you so much. It's such a dichotomy between accuracy versus some other idea that's promoted there. Yeah. And it's very telling to me. I don't want to denigrate him again because I don't know about this. But it's so telling to think about where the efforts to be accurate were directed in that painting. Yes. Thank you. And did you have the year 2015 on it? I couldn't remember the exact. I did. Is that right? I think so. I just can't remember. I know it was commissioned by the president by Judy, excuse me, Judy Bonner then. And it hung at Gorgas for not very long, but for a while. When I walked into Gorgas and saw it, you could have knocked me down with a feather because I didn't know about it. So I thought they're hanging in Gorgas. Yeah. Are there other thoughts or questions or areas of expertise that I should know about among you all? Very nice presentation. Thank you. Having worked and been on campus for more than 24 years, I learned a lot today. So thank you. Thanks for saying that. I'm happy to hear that. Kate, I don't want to call you out, but do you want to acknowledge other areas of potential research that you've identified in the collections? Honestly, after hearing your presentation, I learned a lot of stuff even I didn't know. So I think there are definitely areas, especially with those tantalizing details in the Manly Diaries to explore. But we also have a lot of other kind of financial and administrative records that give more of those kind of details. So being able to start matching up the names of enslaved people to their owners and then learning more about the owners, I think are good avenues. And I know that also Dr. Hillary Green has done a lot of work kind of tracing where some of those people went after, you know, emancipation and how they became members of the community and really built something here in the latter 19th century. So I don't know that I have any grand insights, but I do know that there are other similar materials at Hool that can corroborate what's in the Manly Diaries and provide the same kind of detail. Thank you. And I'm neglected to mention Hillary. I hope all of you know the important work that Hillary's doing in a much deeper, more reflective way than I have been. Thank you, Nicole, for putting her website up. Her website is a wealth of information and blog post about the things she has uncovered. She has an incredible blog that I just read about the women, which I didn't get too much today, but the women that were enslaved on campus and elsewhere in Tuscaloosa. And Kate brings up a really interesting and really important avenue here, which is not something that people have been seeing a lot of success at yet, but although I think it's definitely possible is what happened after 1865. Where did those individuals go? And in his presentation last week, Dr. Rothman mentioned that a lot of them did leave, but something like 20% I might be misquoting him left, which means there were still a lot here that formed important African-American communities within Tuscaloosa. And in the presentation as well, we heard from Reverend Steele, who is the pastor at Hunter Chapel. That's the oldest Black church in Tuscaloosa. And he talked about how originally it was founded in the 1850s by free people of color in Tuscaloosa, also a community about which very little is known, but that their church resided on the grounds of where Bryant Denny Stadium is today, at first. And so, yes, he also is trying to do research into many of the enslaved people in Tuscaloosa and on campus were taken to church. The Methodist Church was a primary site of worship. Were taken to the United Methodist Church with their enslavers, and then in freedom formed the Hunter Chapel Black Methodist Church. And so that to me, and the descendants of the original founders, Hunter Chapel, to me is another avenue where you could trace those things through. But again, you're seeing there's so many threads and there's such important work to be done and so much of it. And you can do that with the Baptist, with the Presbyterians. When you start looking at church records, you can really see people who once were listed with an owner, then after the war are listed by themselves. And then you can see them coming in and out of churches to join. They were treated like other parishioners in terms of they had to have a letter of transfer from one place to the other, but you see them coming in and out and forming their own churches of all sorts. And then something like the Presbyterians, they get involved in forming Stilman College. So I think church records may be a really good place across the board for people look for this kind of stuff. First Baptist Presbyterian Church. Yes, it's true that actually all of the major downtown churches were in one way involved in this issue and have records. I'd also like to highlight for everyone who might be interested in not only from that time period, but moving forward in through the civil rights movement, that we have a local foundation, the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation, that is recovering the history of civil rights in Tuscaloosa, starting from the founding of the state up through, quite frankly, today. Rachel, I also wanted to add that with respect to the peace on churches, this piece that was done by Skip Gates from Harvard just this past fall, I think the night before we were doing one of our other teachings talked about in many of these sanctuaries, as they looked at different churches throughout the south that were once places of worship, both for slave owners and enslaved people, that the enslaved people had to sit upstairs in those sanctuaries while everyone else sat downstairs, which begins to also speak to the architecture of many of these churches and facilities. And so just want to put that out there for anybody who may be beginning that work that yesterday get to go, but still there was reminds me of my movie theater when I was a child, the black people set upstairs and everybody else sat downstairs, but that might be a place that just having that bit of information about how people were organized within within these sanctuaries might be a benefit to someone. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Taylor. I know how busy you are. Thank you for being here. And that is an explicit, you know, very kind of tactile example, still present today in churches today, the choir upstairs was that what developed for that reason. And so yes, so thank you because I believe the architectural history is one very, very important avenue for this research. To me, the architectural history is kind of what helps us understand how it comes into the present because some of these things are still here and we can still see them. We can't deny that they existed when we don't have a lot of material objects of other sorts that bring this history to life. So thank you for sharing that side of it. I know some people are probably thinking, why do we have an art history person talking about slavery, but it's so integral to the story of this campus. Thanks. I agree too. And I was, I sort of backed into this when I taught Southern architecture and decided, you know, on my first semester here to learn about the history of campus and to take students around and look because that is a very powerful architecture is a very powerful, like I said, in tactile way. And then it was our me and my students probing of the history and trying to get to the bottom of it that led me down this path. But and the students, I should say, seem for the most part to be very interested, at least the ones I have taught and learning more about the fabric, as I said, of our campus. I just had one other thought. Tom, do you mind telling folks about the tour in Tuscaloosa in case they're not aware of it? I was just speaking with somebody about it in the meeting before, but that might well present itself as an excellent way to learn more about civil rights here in the city. So if you're this fabulous lecture that Dr. Stevens has done, I think a natural piece, particularly for those of us here on the campus is to make sure they take that fabulous civil rights tour. Thanks for the shout out. That's really great. I appreciate that. And I do want to thank Rachel, too, for her wonderful presentation. Yes, we established a civil rights trail in Tuscaloosa in and around downtown area. It has 18 stops. Each one is of historical value and plays a, gives you a sense of the role that place and people played historically. It related to civil rights and human rights in general. There is a printed brochure that documents the trail that's available from Tuscaloosa Tourism and Sports Office. If you want to take that, we also have a website and the URL is civilrightstuscaloosa.org. That's all one word. And thanks, Ann, lady. She put the URL there in the chat. That website talks a bit about the foundation itself but also has an online version of the trail map and the documentation for each of the stops. So please do check it out. Thank you so much. And I think that this raises the critical point that we should all have in mind when our task force has decided to refer to our commission as slavery and its legacies. Instead of trying to identify those legacies but to acknowledge that the legacies of this information that I was describing play out for generations through civil rights through today. And it's all connected and I think being a person who studies the antebellum period, you know, that's where my natural research leads me. But I can't help but see over and over and over again the relevance of it all to the civil rights period in today. Are there any other questions for Dr. Stevens? If not, I'd like to thank you on behalf of the University Library Diversity Committee. And thank you, Dr. Stevens, for a wonderful presentation. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to everybody for taking the time this afternoon. I appreciate it. Thank you.